Popular music styles are often closely connected to the social situations where they first began. Rock ‘n’ roll grew out of the heady culture of American cities following the Great Migration and World War II, as formerly rural blacks brought rapidly evolving jazz and rhythm and blues into cities. Decades later, the disinvested inner cities of 1980s America helped foster the rap and hip hop that we listen to today.

Photo by Reuters/Fabian Bimmer

Heavy metal is a strange case, then. The music sprouted originally from working-class kids in economically ravaged, deindustrialized places like Birmingham, England. Even today, it seems to be most popular among disadvantaged, alienated, working-class kids.

But take a look at the map below, which I wrote about two years ago, and have been thinking again about over the past couple of months. It tracks the number of heavy metal bands per 100,000 residents using data from the Encyclopaedia Metallum. The genre holds less sway in the ravaged postindustrial places of its birth, but remains insanely popular in Scandinavian countries known for their relative wealth, robust social safety nets, and incredibly high quality of life.

When I wrote about this map back in 2012, commenters had all sorts of explanations for why heavy metal spread so far north so intensely. Metal’s emotional darkness, some said, reflected northern Europe’s long, cold winter nights. The fury of the music and the violence of some of its lyrics resonated with Scandinavia’s pagan past, what with all those Viking raiders and Berserkers. One commenter suggested that the music correlated worldwide with high levels of alcoholism.

ndeed, a decade-old article by Mark Ames, “Black Metal Nation: What do Norwegian Dirtheads and Richard Perle Have in Common?” suggests that metal might be the adolescent id that is simmering beneath Northern Europe’s outwardly complacent façade. “Norway,” he wrote, “is not only a completely humorless society… but… a deeply oppressive society, in a recognizably bland, caring, pious, Social Democratic way.” Metalheads experience their boredom, he speculated, as “real suffering.” According to this logic, metal may instead be the product of affluent societies, a countercultural backlash for the privileged.

I thought it would be fun to dig a little deeper into the economic and social factors associated with the popularity of heavy metal across various nations. I’m not a metal head but have long been a Black Sabbath fan. They were the first rock band I ever saw in concert and I cut my teeth on guitar playing “Iron Man” and “War Pigs” in my middle school band.

So with the help of my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander, I examined the connections between heavy metal and a range of economic and social factors. What we found may surprise you. Mellander, who is Swedish, attributes Scandinavia’s proclivity for heavy metal bands to its governments’ efforts to put compulsory music training in schools, which created a generation with the musical chop to meet metal’s technical demands. (As The Atlanticnoted last fall, this has helped the region excel in pop music as well). As always, I point out that correlation does not equal causation and points simply to associations between variables.

What we found is that that the number of heavy metal bands in a given country is associated with its wealth and affluence.

At the country-level, the number of heavy metal bands per capita is positively associated with economic output per capita (.71); level of creativity (.71) and entrepreneurship (.66); share of adults that hold college degrees (.68); as well as overall levels of human development (.79), well-being, and satisfaction with life (.60).

The bottom line? Though metal may be the music of choice for some alienated working-class males, it enjoys its greatest popularity in the most advanced, most tolerant, and knowledge-based places in the world. Strange as it may seem, heavy metal springs not from the poisoned slag of alienation and despair but the loamy soil of post-industrial prosperity. This makes sense after all: while new musical forms may spring from disadvantaged, disgruntled, or marginalized groups, it is the most advanced and wealthy societies that have the media and entertainment companies that can propagate new sounds and genres, as well as the affluent young consumers with plenty of leisure time who can buy it.

“Heavy Metal Music”, the debut album from NEWSTED — the new band featuring former METALLICA, VOIVOD and FLOTSAM AND JETSAM bassist Jason Newsted and STAIND guitarist Mike Mushok — can be streamed in its entirety in the YouTube clip below. The CD will be released on August 6 in North America via Chophouse Records/Collective Sounds and August 5 in Europe through Spinefarm Records. Jason told Billboard.com the 11-song album will be very similar to the band’s debut EP, “Metal”, which sold around 6,200 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 62 on The Billboard 200 chart. “The EP was always intended to be the primer, a sampler of what was to come on the LP,” he said. “It’s all metal all the time. It’s not all fast, but it is all heavy.”

Regarding how the material for NEWSTED‘s debut album came together, Jason told Loudwire: “It started out as my seeds for the first eleven songs that I made on my GarageBand thing. I wrote all the tracks — guitars, bass, drums, everything and gave them to Jessie [Farnsworth, guitar] and Jesus [Mendez Jr., drums] and had them go learn it, put their artistry on it and so it was collaborative in that way for the first batch. Like the four songs on the EP came from that initial eleven, so that’s how those songs went. Each day as we get deeper into the songs, the collaboration gets deeper as well. I have come a long way from my tunnel vision of ‘Only my ideas are good enough’ bullshit, and I’m a lot more open to everyone’s ideas and the artistry of each person to make it what it is. And three heads is better than one and that kind of thing. So it has become more collaborative as we go. I’ve written ten more since that time in October last year and a few of them have made their way onto this LP now. Once again, they were all my seeds, but now that we have Mike Mushok in the band and I give the music to all three of those guys, now I have three great artists bringing back their responses and their counterpoint playing to my ideas, so it’s becoming more and more collaborative every day and on this LP there will be shared writing credits on at least half of the songs with the writing credits now.”

As previously reported, three songs from NEWSTED — “Long Time Dead”, “King Of The Underdogs” and “Heroic Dose” — are featured in the newest episode of Break Media‘s hit web series “Man At Arms”.

NEWSTED‘s heavy metal pairs as background for the gritty series, which follows famous Hollywood blacksmith Tony Swatton as he builds real-life versions of iconic pop-culture (“Pirates Of The Caribbean”, “The Matrix”, “Spider-Man”, etc.) weapons by hand.

NEWSTED is taking part in this year’s edition of Gigantour, the critically acclaimed package festival founded in 2005 by MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine. Also appearing on the bill are headliners MEGADETH, along with BLACK LABEL SOCIETY, DEVICE, HELLYEAH and DEATH DIVISION.

NEWSTED was forced to miss last week’s Gigantour dates in Canada after Jason was diagnosed with “walking pneumonia.”

NEWSTED kicked off its first-ever U.S. tour on April 19 at Red House in Walnut Creek, California. The 14-date trek concluded on May 23 in Asbury Park, New Jersey and led into a number of European festival appearances for the band.

Quality fan-filmed video footage of NEWSTED — the new band led by former METALLICA, VOIVOD and FLOTSAM AND JETSAM bassist Jason Newsted — performing on June 15 at the Copenhell festival at Refshaleøen in Copenhagen, Denmark can be seen below.

NEWSTED‘s full-length debut, “Heavy Metal Music”, will be released on August 6 in North America via Chophouse Records/Collective Sounds and August 5 in Europe through Spinefarm Records. Jason told Billboard.com the 11-song album will be very similar to the band’s debut EP, “Metal”, which sold around 6,200 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 62 on The Billboard 200 chart. “The EP was always intended to be the primer, a sampler of what was to come on the LP,” he said. “It’s all metal all the time. It’s not all fast, but it is all heavy.”

NEWSTED has been confirmed for this year’s edition of Gigantour, the critically acclaimed package festival founded in 2005 by MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine. Also scheduled to appear on the bill are headliners MEGADETH, along with BLACK LABEL SOCIETY, DEVICE, HELLYEAH and DEATH DIVISION.

NEWSTED kicked off its first-ever U.S. tour on April 19 at Red House in Walnut Creek, California. The 14-date trek concluded on May 23 in Asbury Park, New Jersey and has led into a number of European festival appearances for the band, which is rounded out by STAIND guitarist Mike Mushok, drummer Jesus Mendez Jr. and guitarist Jessie Farnsworth.

According to the Toronto Star, a new study published in the journal Pediatrics is the first to provide evidence that an early preference for different types of noisy, rebellious, nonmainstream music genres is a strong predictor of concurrent and later minor delinquency.

“We were stunned ourselves,” said Dr. Tom Ter Bogt of Utrecht University in the Netherlands said. “We checked it over and over again.”

Research showed that “early preferences are more important predictors of later delinquency compared with developing preferences for deviant music (i.e., increases in liking of nonmainstream music across adolescence did not indicate more delinquency at age 16). Specifically, adolescents with a strong early preference for music types that have been labeled as deviant (hip-hop, heavy metal, gothic, punk, and techno/hardhouse) were more engaged in minor delinquency in late adolescence.”

Ter Bogt told the Toronto Star: “What we believe happens if you have this taste for rebellious music, noisy music, it brings you in contact with other kids with the same type of music taste and you are contaminated by the behaviour in that group.

“If you listen to classical music or jazz, overall these kids tend to behave far less dramatically.”

He added: “I would suggest to parents if your 12-year-old child listens to very, very noisy music, rebellious music, be aware of what kinds of friends he or she brings to the house.”